Entangling Vines: A Classic Collection of Zen Koans

Entangling Vines

Wisdom Publications, Inc.

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© 2013 Thomas Yūhō Kirchner

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shūmon kattōshū. English.

Entangling vines : Zen koans of the Shūmon kattōshū / translated and annotated by Thomas Yūhō Kirchner ; foreword by Nelson Foster ; introduction by Ueda Shizuteru. — First Wisdom edition.

pages cm

Previously published: Saga Tenryuji : Tenryu-ji Institute for Philosophy and Religion, 2004.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-61429-077-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Rinzai (Sect)—Quotations, maxims, etc. 2. Koan. I. Kirchner, Thomas Yūhō, translator, writer of added commentary. II. Title.

BQ9367.S5813 2013

294.3’927—dc23

2012037699

ISBN 978-1-61429-077-3

eBook ISBN 978-1-61429-096-4

17 16 15 14 13

5  4  3  2  1

Cover art by Phil Pascuzzo. Cover design by Gopa&Ted2. Set in Minion Pro and SimSun fonts 10.5pt/12.6pt. Typesetting for this book was done by Thomas Yūhō Kirchner.

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Contents

Foreword by Nelson Foster

Introduction by Ueda Shizuteru

Translator’s Preface

Preface to the Wisdom Edition

Conventions and Abbreviations

Entangling Vines, Part 1

Case 1 Pacifying the Mind of the Second Patriarch

Case 2 The Sixth Patriarch’s Robe and Bowl

Case 3 Wuzu’s Someone’s Servants

Case 4 Yunmen’s Mount Sumeru

Case 5 Mazu’s This Very Mind

Case 6 Zhaozhou’s Drop It!

Case 7 Doushuai’s Three Barriers

Case 8 Lingyun Sees Peach Blossoms

Case 9 Zhaozhou’s Juniper Tree

Case 10 Huanglong’s Three Barriers

Case 11 Ruiyan’s Master

Case 12 Zhaozhou Sees Through an Old Woman

Case 13 Langzhong’s Hell

Case 14 Changsheng’s Chaos

Case 15 One Peak Is Not White

Case 16 An Ox Goes through a Lattice Window

Case 17 Qianfeng’s Three Types of Sickness

Case 18 Shangu’s Sweet-Olive Blossoms

Case 19-1 Xiangyan’s Up a Tree

Case 19-2 Dahui’s Up a Tree

Case 20 Yunmen’s Dry Piece of Shit

Case 21 Yunmen’s "Sulu"

Case 22-1 Deshan Carries His Bowls

Case 22-2 Mian’s True Meaning

Case 23 Mazu’s West River

Case 24 Not Entering Nirvana

Case 25 Shishuang’s Top of a Pole

Case 26 Xiangyan’s Sound of a Bamboo

Case 27 The Mind Turns with Its Surroundings

Case 28-1 Qiannu and Her Spirit

Case 28-2 Xutang’s Verse

Case 29 Yunmen’s Exposed

Case 30 Mian’s Brittle Bowl

Case 31 The National Teacher Calls Three Times

Case 32 Lan’an’s Being and Nonbeing

Case 33 Nanquan’s Sickle

Case 34 Baizhang’s Wild Fox

Case 35 Kanzan’s Works like a Thief

Case 36 Two Monks Roll Up Bamboo Shades

Case 37 Use the Empty Sky for Paper

Case 38 The Wise Women in the Mortuary Grove

Case 39 Drifting to the Land of the Demons

Case 40 A Scholar Writes a Treatise

Case 41 The Lamp in the Room

Case 42 Cast Aside Both Mind and Body

Case 43 Bodhidharma Didn’t Come to China

Case 44 Danxia Burns a Buddha Image

Case 45 Asleep or Awake, At All Times Be One

Case 46-1 Zhaozhou’s "Wu"

Case 46-2 A Verse on Zhaozhou’s Wu

Case 46-3 Zhongfeng’s Eight-Word Question on "Wu"

Case 46-4 Dahui’s "Wu"

Case 46-5 Before the Monk Asked about Buddha Nature

Case 46-6 Penetrate It Thoroughly

Case 47 Buddha Straight, Ancestors Crooked

Case 48 A Woman Comes Out of Samadhi

Case 49 East Mountain Walks on the Water

Case 50 Lotus Samadhi

Case 51 The Buddha of Great Universal Wisdom Excellence

Case 52 Huanglong’s Sutra Chanting

Case 53 Mazu’s Salt and Sauce

Case 54 Juniper Tree, Carrying Bowls

Case 55 Mr. Zhang Drinks Wine

Case 56 Gushan’s Gāthā

Case 57 To Lose a Human Birth

Case 58 Shoushan’s This Sutra

Case 59 Xinghua’s Hold to the Center

Case 60 Guishan’s Water Buffalo

Case 61 The Sail Has Yet to Be Hoisted

Case 62 Dongshan’s Three Pounds of Hemp

Case 63 Nantang’s Other Realms

Case 64 No Merit

Case 65 A Man in a Thousand-Foot Well

Case 66 Damei’s Plum Pit

Case 67 Fadeng Is Not Yet Finished

Case 68 Nanquan’s Fried Dumplings

Case 69 A Springless Lock

Case 70 The Six Non-Buddhist Teachers

Case 71 Bajiao’s Staff

Case 72 The Buddha Never Preached

Case 73 Yuanwu’s Gate of Misfortune

Case 74 Drop Deluded Thought

Case 75 Misusing the Mind

Case 76 Yangshan’s Headrest

Case 77 The Three Buddhas’ Night Talk

Case 78 Mazu’s Moon Viewing

Case 79 The Buddhas Don’t Know It

Case 80 Linji’s Solitary Peak

Case 81 Speech and Silence

Case 82 Yangshan’s Gavel

Case 83 The Sixth Patriarch’s Banner in the Wind

Case 84 Comments on the Five Houses

Case 85 All the Plants

Case 86 Know the Emptiness of All That Exists

Case 87 Why the Woman Came Out of Samadhi

Case 88 To See Form and Enlighten the Mind

Case 89 A Meeting on Another Mountain

Case 90 Nanquan’s Water Buffalo

Case 91 Yunmen’s Three Statements

Case 92 A Fragrant Breeze from the South

Case 93 Baizhang’s New Paddy

Case 94 The Avataṃsaka Sutra’s Simile of the Mind

Case 95 Yun’an Returns the Vestment

Case 96 A Verse in Praise of the Sixth Patriarch

Case 97 When Someone Is Ordained

Case 98 Yuanwu’s Enlightenment Verse

Case 99 Jiashan’s Surroundings

Case 100 Straw Sandals in My Vestment

Case 101 Jiashan Digs a Hole

Case 102 Hear in the Morning, Die in the Evening

Case 103 Ordinary Mind Is the Way

Case 104 Calling for Help from the Well Tower

Case 105 A Dead Snake in the Road

Case 106 Ciming’s Practice

Case 107 Daitō’s Three Questions

Case 108 Vimalakīrti, the Golden-Millet Tathāgata

Case 109 The Barbarian Has No Beard

Case 110 Mind Is Not Buddha

Case 111 Qingshui, Poor and Alone

Case 112 Vimalakīrti’s Ten-Foot-Square Room

Case 113 Foxing’s Three Turning-Phrases

Case 114 When the Buddha Was Born

Case 115 Nanquan Loses the Fire

Case 116 Guishan Picks Tea

Case 117 Baizhang’s No Eating

Case 118 Nanyue’s Explanation

Case 119 Luopu’s Offerings

Case 120 Yunmen’s Tune

Case 121 Zhaozhou’s Put Out the Fire!

Case 122 Huangbo’s Staff

Case 123 Comparing Three Students of Linji

Case 124 The World-Honored-One’s Lotus Eyes

Case 125 The Secret Transmission from West to East

Case 126 Confucius’s Changes

Case 127 Earning a Living and Producing Things

Entangling Vines, Part 2

Case 128 Deshan Burns His Commentaries

Case 129 Dongshan and the Earth Spirit

Case 130 Xinghua Levies a Fine

Case 131 Magu and the Hand-Cloth

Case 132 Shushan’s Memorial Tombstone

Case 133 King Udayana Thinks of the Buddha

Case 134 Shoushan’s Stick

Case 135 The World-Honored-One Holds Up a Flower

Case 136 Mahākāśyapa’s Temple Flagpole

Case 137 Guanghui’s Evil Karma

Case 138 Qianfeng’s Single Road

Case 139 Nanyue Polishes a Tile

Case 140 Doushuai’s Lychees

Case 141 Realm of the Buddha, Realm of Mara

Case 142 Songyuan’s Three Turning-Phrases

Case 143 Xutang’s Three Questions

Case 144 Daitō’s Three Turning-Phrases

Case 145 Nanquan Living in a Hermitage

Case 146 Ciming’s Signpost

Case 147 Ciming’s Bowl of Water

Case 148 Putting on Your Vestment at the Sound of the Bell

Case 149 Subtle Flow

Case 150 Fayun Addresses the Assembly

Case 151 Yangshan Smashes a Mirror

Case 152 Yunmen’s Sermon

Case 153 Chen Cao in a Tower

Case 154 An Old Woman Burns Down a Hermitage

Case 155 A Different Way of Doing Things

Case 156 One Word and a Four-Horse Team

Case 157 The Dharmakāya Eats Food

Case 158 Xutang’s Words

Case 159 The Three Statements of Linji

Case 160 The Avataṃsaka Sutra’s Dharma Realms

Case 161 Dongshan’s End of the Training Period

Case 162 Caoshan’s Great Sea

Case 163 The Verse of Vipaśyin

Case 164 Yunmen Loses His Powers

Case 165 Aṅgulimāla and the Difficult Delivery

Case 166 Yantou the Ferryman

Case 167 Magu Digs Up Weeds

Case 168 Haoyue’s Paying Debts

Case 169 Daitō’s Iron

Case 170 Buddha’s Teaching, Bodhidharma’s Intention

Case 171 Comment and Verse on the Final Word

Case 172 Ciming Tends the Hearth

Case 173 Ciming and the Tiger’s Roar

Case 174 Ciming Takes Off a Shoe

Case 175 Kanzan’s Inherently Perfect Buddha

Case 176 Linji’s Hunk of Red Flesh

Case 177 Linji’s Four Realms

Case 178 Linji’s Four Shouts

Case 179 One Shout Remains

Case 180 Linji’s Host and Guest

Case 181 The Four Guest-Host Relationships

Case 182 Baizhang Goes to See Mazu Again

Case 183-1 Ciming’s Consecutive Shouts

Case 183-2 Xutang’s Dark Valley

Case 184 Xinghua’s Two Waves of the Hand

Case 185 Nanyuan’s Pecking and Tapping

Case 186 Xutang’s Staff

Case 187 Linji Delivers a Blow

Case 188 Dongshan’s Three-Score Blows

Case 189 Ciming Asks about the Three-Score Blows

Case 190 Zhaozhou Checks Two Hermits

Case 191 Langye’s Perception First

Case 192 Linji Plants Pines

Case 193 Baizhang’s Already Explained

Case 194 Deshan Uses His Stick

Case 195 Linji’s Blind Ass

Case 196 Zhang Zhuo Sees the Sutra

Case 197 The Staff of the South

Case 198 Mañjuśrī Visits

Case 199 To Knock Down with One Blow

Case 200 Xuefeng Strikes a Monk

Case 201 Sudhana Gets Some Medicine

Case 202 Touzi Answers Buddha

Case 203 Yunmen Calls Attendant Chengyuan

Case 204 The Śūraṅgama Sutra’s Turning Things Around

Case 205 Shoukuo’s Lame Nag

Case 206 Changsha Enjoys the Moon

Case 207-1 Linji Washes His Feet

Case 207-2 Songyuan Takes the High Seat

Case 208 Linji’s Four Positions

Case 209 Lu Gen’s Laughing and Crying

Case 210 Linji’s Four Functions

Case 211 Qianfeng’s Take Up the One

Case 212 Mañjuśrī Gives Rise to Views

Case 213 Tettō’s Admonitions

Case 214 The Infinite Realms

Case 215 Letian Asks about the Dharma

Case 216 Fubei Answers a Woman

Case 217 Form Is Emptiness

Case 218 Linji Asks for Alms

Case 219 Zhaozhou’s Talk around the Fireside

Case 220 Guishan Picks Up a Grain of Rice

Case 221 Changshi Watches a Polo Game

Case 222 No Merit, Evil Realms

Case 223 Pure Original Nature

Case 224 An Uncut Weed Patch

Case 225 The Garuḍa King

Case 226 Split in Two, Torn in Three

Case 227 The Merit of Donating Food to the Sangha

Case 228 Langye’s Great Bell

Case 229 In the Dharma There Is No Duality

Case 230 A Veteran General of the Dharma Assembly

Case 231 Flower Adornment Samadhi

Case 232 Let Go of Everything

Case 233 Sound the Dharma Drum

Case 234 The Mind-Ground Contains the Seeds

Case 235 The Dharma Realm of the Emptiness of Emptiness

Case 236 If a Single Dharma Exists

Case 237 Atop Mount Putuo

Case 238 The Origin of the Circle-Figures

Case 239 Hongzhi’s Four Uses

Case 240 After Birth and Before Discrimination

Case 241 Where Wisdom Cannot Reach

Case 242 An Ancient Worthy’s Great Death

Case 243 Huijue’s No Sin

Case 244 The Eight Phrases of Hongzhi

Case 245 To Be Stepped On without Anger

Case 246 A Piece of Rope on a Moonlit Night

Case 247 Xianzong Asks about the Light

Case 248 The Great King Has Come

Case 249 Responding to a Wayfarer on the Road

Case 250 Huangbo Bows to a Buddha Image

Case 251 Prince Nata Tears His Flesh

Case 252 Yinfeng Pushes a Wheelbarrow

Case 253 Kanzan Scolds a Monk

Case 254 I Accept That the Old Barbarian Knows

Case 255 Ten Realizations, Same Reality

Case 256 Tianhuang’s Like This

Case 257 Jiashan’s Dharmakāya

Case 258 Chaling’s Enlightenment Verse

Case 259 Baiyun’s Still Lacking

Case 260 Taizong Holds a Bowl

Case 261 Stop All Thoughts

Case 262 Zhaozhou’s Stone Bridge

Case 263 A Buddha Long Ago Set His Mind

Case 264 Dongshan’s Fruit

Case 265 Changqing’s Staff

Case 266 A Monk Is Bitten by a Snake

Case 267 The National Teacher’s Water Bowl

Case 268 Moving through the Three Realms

Case 269 A Clear-Eyed Person Falls into a Well

Case 270-1 Shoushan’s Principles of the Teaching

Case 270-2 Filthy, Stagnant Water

Case 271 The Sound of the Wood Isn’t Separate from Me

Case 272 Nanquan’s Death

Reference Materials

Biographical Notes

Chart of Names in Pinyin

Chart of Names in Wade-Giles

Chart of Names in Japanese

Bibliography

Index

About the Translator

Foreword

THIS BOOK OFFERS ENTANGLING VINES, but who would want them and what for? The phrase suggests tough, jungly vegetation that will trip you up, snag you in its rope-like sinews, and hold you captive. As a title, it seems calculated to put off all but the boldest or most foolhardy readers, signaling that exploration of these pages will be a struggle—arduous, exhausting, possibly futile altogether. It invites risk-takers, curiosity seekers, and especially, perhaps, people driven to get to the bottom of life’s biggest questions. Shall we count you in?

As the subtitle makes clear, the vines threatening to tie us up here are koans, the famously enigmatic little stories of Zen tradition. The liveliness and strangeness of koans—the humor and inscrutability of their repartee, their unorthodox treatment of Buddhist doctrine, the indifference they exhibit to logic or social convention, their frequent eruption into hitting and hollering, their broad expressive range, from crudeness to banality to poetry of great subtlety and beauty—have made them intriguing to people of diverse cultures ever since they emerged as a feature of Zen’s Chinese precursor, Chan, some nine centuries ago.

Understanding has lagged far behind interest, unfortunately. In attempting to characterize koans, popular writers commonly resort to the words puzzles and riddles, which are so inaccurate as to be positively misleading. Academic specialists fare little better with such arid definitions as pedagogical tools for religious training. Zen masters, who seem supremely qualified to explain the nature and working of koans, typically deflect requests for such information, declaring words inadequate to do justice to the phenomenon. Try a koan and see for yourself, they say.

Which brings us back to the entanglement under consideration—yours. Entanglement in koans takes two basic forms, one of them praised in Chan and Zen tradition, the other deplored, even ridiculed. The latter is a fascination with koans that remains merely literary or intellectual. The tradition doesn’t reject such pursuits wholesale; indeed, it possesses an extraordinarily rich literature, and many of its great figures have demonstrated nimbleness and delight in the life of the mind. Zen has always insisted, however, that other interests be subordinated to practice and awakening, and it deploys a set of vivid metaphors to emphasize the absurdity and fruitlessness of a Zen student entering the thickets of analysis and interpretation before experiencing insight: heading east when you want to go west, scratching your shoe when your foot itches, beating the cart instead of the horse.

The approved form of entanglement with koans involves thorough, sustained absorption in one koan at a time, in the hope that it will eventually resolve in a deeply liberating realization. Before the process runs its course, however, engaging a koan in this fashion often feels tedious or even torturous—every bit as constricting and exasperating as the title metaphor implies—and the bonds grow still tighter if one thrashes around mentally in the effort to get loose. So whoever originally applied the phrase entangling vines to koans undoubtedly deserves a prize for Truth in Advertising (Medieval Chinese Division). It wasn’t a private effort, though; institutionally, for centuries Chan and Zen have stressed the hardship of working with koans, promoting images of the process even more painful to contemplate than getting snarled in a web of creepers. The most cringe-inducing of these liken koan study to nightmares at the dining table—gnawing on an iron bun, eating the putrid mash left after the fermentation of alcohol, lapping up the shit and piss of bygone sages, swallowing a red-hot iron ball that can’t be disgorged.

Despite such repulsive warnings, generations of Zen practitioners—male and female, lay and monastic, dauntless or terrified—have undertaken koan work and survived to verify its joys and lasting benefits as well as its intermittent miseries. Most descriptions of the process attribute the difficulty of koans to their deliberate thwarting of rationality. By this account, koans function as efficient traps for logical thought because the masters of old designed them expressly for that purpose. While it’s true that logic rarely produces significant insight into a koan, the notion that koans are explicitly intended to impede logic doesn’t hold up.

Centuries ago, the annals of Chan tell us, a monk questioned his distinguished master about the sayings of his predecessors, asking, Did the buddhas and ancestral teachers have the intention of tricking people or not? The master’s reply holds for Buddhist texts of all kinds but fits koans particularly well:

Tell me, do rivers and lakes have any intention of obstructing people? Although rivers and lakes have no intention of obstructing people, still people can’t cross them, so they become barriers from a human standpoint. Although ancestral teachers and buddhas had no intention of tricking people, right now people can’t go beyond them, so ancestral teachers and buddhas trick people after all.

Rather than presuming that koans were created to confound us, we would do well to take them at face value, as good-faith attempts to present the Dharma, the wisdom of the Buddha, in a straightforward, perhaps striking, manner. Many events in everyday life surprise and confuse us, after all, though no one intends them to; we simply don’t understand them or even know how to understand them. From this perspective, it seems utterly unremarkable that a koan—a few words cherished for illuminating reality in a profound way—would go over our heads on first encounter (and maybe for quite a while afterward). Koans often perplex the monastics and laypeople who appear in them, and evidence abounds that they’ve perplexed innumerable monks, nuns, and laypeople who’ve pondered them as well. You’re baffled by them? Big deal. Join the crowd.

Beyond the qualities that have made koans a challenge in any age lie obstacles of a more mundane sort. Readers of this book can’t help being hampered by the fact that an enormous gulf of time, language, history, and worldview separates us from the original parties to its content—both the people who speak and act in its koans and those who later transcribed, edited, compiled, and published them. While the latter surely had posterity in mind as they went about their tasks, they had to speak to their culture in its own terms. Even if they could have imagined readers like you and me, they couldn’t possibly have tailored their texts to suit modern minds.

Judging it infeasible to bridge this culture gap, some Asian teachers whose own training centered on traditional koans have chosen to set them aside when instructing Westerners, instead improvising koans free of exotic references. Other masters, determined to transmit the legacy of koan study intact, have strived to help non-Asian practitioners cross the cultural gulf. This effort has sometimes led them to minimize cultural differences and assert dubiously universal human qualities and archetypes, and it has inevitably necessitated more or less detailed exposition of distinctively Asian elements that crop up in the koan stories.

Entangling Vines presents a lesser problem in this regard than earlier and better-known koan casebooks such as the Gateless Barrier and Blue Cliff Record, for it dispenses with all the embellishments that complicate and enrich those collections. Even so, most readers would be lost without the exemplary assistance that Thomas Kirchner provides in this translation, elucidating as he does every contextual feature that would obscure the basic sense of its koans. Luckily for us, he works from both sides of the cultural divide, coupling scholarly expertise and long years as a Zen priest in Japan with a keen awareness of Westerners’ needs deriving from his American upbringing. Besides rendering the text into English with great care, he has supplied the Chinese graphs for convenient comparison, generously annotated terms and allusions that would escape most of us otherwise, and furnished biographical information on every identifiable figure who appears herein.

Thus equipped, in most instances even a newcomer to Zen can readily discern the literal meaning of these koans and get a sense of their players, but engagement with a koan only starts there. What ensues will depend on a number of factors: your background in Zen practice and in koan training particularly, the character of the specific koan under consideration, your teacher’s guidance, and so on. In general, however, the process involves finding one’s way into the koan, imaginatively inhabiting the situation that it describes and exploring the metaphors and images it uses. Out of this reconnoitering comes an awareness of which point or points in the koan require clarification. Then the hard work begins. To promote full absorption in the koan and penetration of each point, many masters advocate the use of a huatou ( , J., watō), a word or brief phrase that stands in for the full koan and that, with enough determination and practice, you can learn to carry in the midst of daily life and even in sleep, as well as during periods of formal, seated practice (zazen).

From this, it should be apparent that we’re talking about complete immersion in the koan, an absorption that crosses supposed boundaries between the physical, emotional, psychological, and mental aspects of our lives. Although reason doesn’t play a prominent role in this process, it can’t be excluded; as engagement with the koan deepens, a type of inquiry develops that doesn’t privilege one faculty over another. It often comes as a surprise to Westerners that inquiry of this nature is bodily as much as anything else and that, accordingly, expressions such as working on a koan don’t boil down to euphemisms for thinking hard. Rather, they signify total commitment to the koan without trying to wring meaning from it. Its resolution can’t be forced. One can only trust the process and carry on, however long it may take. Such is the degree of entanglement that koan study calls for.

At no small risk of oversimplification, perhaps we can say that koan work amounts, in the long run, to passing through a koan as a set of words and reanimating the realization from which those words sprang. The experience of resolving a koan has the quality of seeing with your own eyes what its originator must have seen in order to formulate them that way. One has the feeling not of matching wits with some faraway sage but of an intimate, immediate meeting of minds, a variation on the mind-to-mind transmission that Chan and Zen have noisily proclaimed and celebrated. A well-known Chinese master of the thirteenth century went so far as to declare that a breakthrough on his preferred koan would enable you to meet its author personally and walk hand in hand with the generations of ancestral masters, truly knitting your eyebrows with theirs, seeing with the same eyes and hearing with the same ears.

How this could occur no one can tell. I suppose neuroscientists may hope to document it with their imaging devices, but such an event is rare enough even in serene temple circumstances that the chances of its taking place under laboratory conditions become hopelessly small. To say, as I just did, that resolving a koan entails reanimating a prior realization actually attributes too much agency to the practitioner and too little to the koan. I might just as well say that the ancient realization encapsulated in the koan enlivens us practitioners. A phrase favored by the illustrious master Hakuin Ekaku conveys the mutuality of the process: Mind illuminates old teachings; old teachings illuminate mind.

The preceding overview of koan work derives all but entirely from the lineage of Chan and Zen known in Japan as the Rinzai sect. The other major strain of Japanese Zen, the Sōtō sect, for centuries institutionally disavowed and criticized koan practice, but that’s started to change in recent years. Research demonstrating a long and proud heritage of koan work in their own school has prompted some Sōtō leaders in the United States and elsewhere to begin experimenting with ways to revive it. Entangling Vines may prove helpful in this endeavor, for it contains follow-up koans, often referred to as checking questions, omitted by earlier koan collections. Masters use these secondary koans to test students’ realization and prod them to further insights.

The Sōtō sect historically has denigrated koan practice chiefly on the grounds that it can become delusory in its own right, hooking people on a quest for buddha nature—a quest to grasp the ungraspable and gain what nobody lacks. This criticism, trenchant as it is, doesn’t diminish in any regard the benefit countless Chan and Zen practitioners past and present have received from koan work, but it does point up a third form of entanglement with koans perhaps more dangerous than the pair described above. Frequently koans cling for a while after resolving, as practitioners’ understandable elation and feeling of accomplishment morph into smugness and obsession with passing koans. If this tendency isn’t soon scotched, it can easily toughen into private arrogance and condescension and, even more lamentably, sometimes results in exaggerated public attention to kenshō (realization experiences) and koan study per se. Old Chan worthies called this getting bound with a golden chain, since attachment to liberation has brought merely a glorified sort of enslavement.

Consider yourself warned. Entangling Vines is a magnificent book, subject to serious and consequential misuse. If you feel drawn to investigation of koans, get yourself a reliable guide—a Zen master of good reputation who’s done protracted, close training in a lineage with a history of koan work—and throw yourself into it headlong. The old vines still hold.

Nelson Foster

NELSON FOSTER is a Dharma heir of Diamond Sangha founder Robert Aitken and succeeded him at its Honolulu temple. He now teaches mainly at Ring of Bone Zendo in the Sierra Nevada foothills, making periodic visits to the East Rock Sangha in New England.

Introduction

THE KOAN COLLECTION Shūmon kattōshū has found an able translator in Thomas Kirchner, a ten-year veteran of Zen monastic life and presently the caretaker of Rinsen-ji, the subtemple that serves as the Founder’s Hall of Tenryū-ji in Kyoto. In translating this work, one of the most important texts for Japanese Rinzai koan studies, Kirchner worked closely with Rev. Hirata Seikō (1924–2008), the former Chief Abbot of the Tenryū-ji branch of Rinzai Zen and former master of Tenryū-ji monastery.

Born in the state of Maryland in 1949, Kirchner left the United States in 1969 for a junior-year-abroad program at the International Division of Waseda University in Tokyo. There he studied Japanese culture and religion, and practiced the martial art of kyūdō (Japanese archery). His first encounter with a Zen master was with ninety-five-year-old Katō Kōzan Rōshi (1876–1971), the priest of a small temple in the mountains west of Tokyo and one of the greatest Zen teachers of that generation. Through this connection he later met Kōzan Rōshi’s successor, Tsukada Kōun Rōshi (1898–1985), priest of the temple Shōan-ji in Nagano Prefecture, where Kirchner moved in early 1971 to begin formal Zen practice.

Kirchner’s encounter with these two exceptional teachers determined the course of his subsequent training. In the Spring 1996 issue of the journal Zen Bunka, Kirchner briefly described his stay under Kōun Rōshi. I find it a particularly evocative picture of his early contact with Zen, so I reproduce it here in full:

On the weekends I used to attend the meditation retreats at Katō Kōzan’s temple Toku’un-in, located deep in a valley where two rivers joined. It was on one of these visits that I first met Tsukada Kōun Rōshi.

Every autumn, as the Japanese maples started to redden, Kōun Rōshi and several of his students would visit Toku’un-in to pay their respects to Kōzan Rōshi. On these occasions meditation would be cancelled, and everyone would gather around a large table for an informal dinner in honor of the visitors. Kōun Rōshi, seventy-two years old at the time, had none of the mysterious air that I once associated with Zen masters. He was a plain man, looking rather like an old farmer, with a gaze that was open, yet penetrating and perceptive.

Those at the table asked me if there was anything I wished to ask Kōun Rōshi. As it was, a question had been on my mind for some time. I had come to Japan on a student visa for my junior-year-abroad program with Waseda, and had remained after the program to begin Zen practice. To support myself I was working as an English teacher, an activity that my visa status did not, strictly speaking, allow. Full honesty with oneself is central to Zen practice, I felt, and yet in order to practice Zen I was having to lie. I asked Kōun Rōshi what I should do in such a situation. He immediately replied, with a good-natured laugh, In a situation like that, you should be completely honest about telling the lie.

My plan had been to live at Toku’un-in from January 1971, but when I arrived at the temple soon after the New Year’s holiday it became obvious that Kōzan Rōshi’s failing health would make that impossible. The people there recommended that I stay instead with Kōun Rōshi at Shōan-ji, saying they would notify him of my coming. The next morning I went to the nearby town of Itsukaichi and boarded a local train for Nagano Prefecture, high in the mountains of central Japan. At about seven o’clock in the evening, after several transfers and a few extended stops at snow-covered rural stations, each one colder than the last, I finally arrived at Nakagomi, the town nearest Shōan-ji. A twenty-minute bus ride took me to the foot of the long stone path leading up to the temple through a grove of giant cryptomeria trees. The moonlight, reflected by the snow, cast a pale glow over the winter landscape.

Reaching the temple, I noticed lights on in the room next to the entrance hall, and called out in greeting. Kōun Rōshi had not, it turned out, received word of my coming, but if he and his wife were surprised to see a shaven-headed foreigner standing in their entranceway they did not show it. My request to stay was accepted without so much as a raised eyebrow. Thus began my half-year stay under this unusual master.

Every day Kōun Rōshi would rise with us at four-thirty in the morning for an hour of zazen in the piercing cold of the meditation hall. After seating himself he would lean forward and strike his own shoulders several times with his short warning-stick (keisaku), as if to spur himself on to greater efforts. Zazen was followed by private sanzen instruction, then about thirty or forty minutes of sutra chanting in the main hall. At the end of the formal sutra service Kōun Rōshi would take a few sticks of lighted incense out on the porch, raise them toward the morning sky in his wrinkled hand, and read a few short sutras.

Kōun Rōshi read the sutras with an unusual rhythm. Katō Kōzan Rōshi once called him a tanuki (a racoon-like animal with a trickster reputation), and, sure enough, whenever anyone tried to follow his rhythm Kōun Rōshi would subtly change it.

But, tanuki though he may have been, Kōun Rōshi had no deceit. There was a deep integrity about him; at that time I was full of unrealistic ideals about Zen, enlightenment, and Zen masters, yet nothing that Kōun Rōshi said or did during the entire time I was there betrayed those ideals, or seemed in any way dishonest or false.

Unusually for a Zen master, he was something of a philosopher, a man who enjoyed discussing ideas and who had a gift for explaining complex problems in simple terms. No matter how abstract or theoretical a question I would ask, he always had a concrete reply that somehow cut through to the core of the issue. Never in these discussions did I sense any impatience—he would explain until I was satisfied, however long that took. The master also put great value on samu , manual labor. The best jobs for Zen monks were weed-pulling and emptying the toilets, he said, and even at his age he would help with those chores.

Later, after I left Nagano and began formal monastic life, I would sometimes return to Shōan-ji during the off-season. No matter what my doubts and questions were at the time, merely being with Kōun Rōshi for a few days was enough to dispel them.

The rōshi remained in good health until the end of his life. According to his wife, one evening he said I’ll rest now, and went to bed. That night he died in his sleep. He was eighty-eight years old.

Desiring to experience formal monastic life, in June 1971 Kirchner entered Shōfuku-ji monastery in Kobe as a lay monk and trained there for three years under Yamada Mumon Rōshi (1900–1988). In 1974 he was ordained and given the name Shaku Yūhō , and soon afterward entered Kenchō-ji monastery in Kamakura as an unsui (a formal Zen training monk). He remained at Kenchō-ji under Minato Sodō Rōshi (1912–2006) until 1978, when he left monastic life for several years to complete his college studies. After receiving a B.A. in Buddhist studies from Ōtani University in 1981, he resumed his training under Sodō Rōshi, who had in the meantime moved to Kennin-ji monastery in Kyoto.

In 1984, after three years at Kennin-ji, Kirchner left the unsui life and moved to the Daitoku-ji subtemple Hōshun-in. Returning to his academic studies, he received a masters degree in Buddhist studies from Otani University and in education from Temple University (Japan). In 1992 he accepted the position of copyeditor at the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture at Nanzan University in Nagoya, and he worked there for six years on the Institute’s journals and monographs. During this period he lived near the Sōtō Zen temple Tokurin-ji, where every morning he tended a large vegetable garden before heading to work. Following a health breakdown in 1997 he resigned his position and returned to Kyoto, where, in addition to his duties as caretaker of the Tenryū-ji subtemple Rinsen-ji, he works at the International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism at Hanazono University.

Kirchner’s varied life experiences, including monastic training, meditation, academic research, and professional translation and editing, can be seen as part of his overall practice of Zen. These elements have now come together to make the Kattōshū available to the English-speaking world.

The Shūmon Kattōshū

The Shūmon kattōshū is one of the few major koan texts to have been compiled in Japan. The name of the compiler (or compilers) is unknown. So, too, is the date of compilation, but the fact that the first printed version appeared in the year 1689 makes it, at the very latest, a work